Influencers
My favorite subject in school was always English, so unsurprisingly, my favorite teachers have been English teachers. In 10th grade, it was Mr. K.
Mr. K wore denim shirts that were softened and distressed with age, baggy chinos, Birkenstocks, and delicate wire-framed reading glasses that he would peer over to go from whatever book he was holding to look at the class. I know now that he was only in his mid-50s when he was my teacher, but at the time, his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows and messy white hair convinced me he was ancient, which made me revere him even more. His wife, whom I recall sported the same hairstyle, just not yet grey, taught off-loom weaving in the art department - a class I now regret not taking. In short, Mr. K and his wife were the coolest hippie teachers at our buttoned-up, private international school.
I remember reading Oedipus Rex and poetry with Mr. K, and watching long episodes of the PBS special on Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth on the television set he would wheel in from the AV department. I didn't always understand what Mr. K talked about - one of his favorite topics was the Troubadours and the invention of love - but it was the first time I realized one could be serious about the study of literature. And that the study of literature was really just the study of humanity.
I've always loved writing letters - real letters, the kind you hand write, fold into thirds, slip into an envelope, buy stamps for and drop in the mailbox and have to wait several weeks and sometimes, months for a reply - and my exchanges with Mr. K, which we began after I left for college, has remained one of my richest and most consistent correspondences (save, of course, for the letters my husband and I wrote to each other before we got married - more on this, perhaps, another day). Despite being a hippie English teacher, Mr. K was never a Luddite - he was using a word-processor when I was still using an electric typewriter in high school. In a letter he wrote to me my sophomore year in college, he conceded that real letters are nice and warm, but that I should really consider email. I never acquiesced - and have at least 25 letters from Mr. K to show for it - until last week.
I think about Mr. K often because I now teach English at the school I attended, where Mr. K once taught me, where I fell in love with literature and writing. I write to Mr. K each year and in recent years, I have not been receiving responses as consistently. A quick calculation placed him in his mid-late 80s. I emailed him from my cubicle in the English office last Monday. I wrote a short update, telling him the classes I was teaching this year (Creative Writing, American Lit, and Asian Lit), shared how I had asked my dad to write the characters 初心 (which translates to "beginner's mind" or "intention") in calligraphy for me and that it hung over my desk at that moment to remind me to enter the classroom each time with a beginner's mind. And then I closed by saying that I would write more, but that I wanted to first confirm that he was still at this address?
I received a reply from Mr. K when I returned to my desk after teaching my first class and in true irreverent Mr. K humor, he corrected me and said that my question should have been whether he was still alive. He is! And happily, at 89. He shared some recent photos of him and his family and directed me to his blog, and more specifically, to a series of entries about the state of his health and mind. The entry that he pinned to the top of his blog is titled, "Why it feels so good to be good as dead," where he writes -
The thing is you suddenly feel utterly free from all the fix'em/get'em thoughts. Fix what you did wrong and fix what or who did you wrong or others or the world.
Suddenly you have Beginner's Mind.
The emphasis of "beginner's mind" is mine - but I suppose, really, it's Mr. K's. We've begun writing again, and this time, I will listen to him and write by email so that neither of us has to wait for an answer.
